Polyphenols, particularly catechols, represent a significant class of compounds characterized by their versatile physicochemical and biological properties, sourced from both natural origins and industrial by‐products. This review highlights their critical redox properties, which enable both antioxidant activity and controlled reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation. These dual capacities underpin their diverse biomedical applications, including the development of materials like nanoparticles, hydrogels, bioadhesives, coatings, and membranes. The review explores their utility in areas such as antimicrobial strategies, advanced cancer therapy, and tissue regeneration, demonstrating how their ROS modulation drives therapeutic effects. Despite promising preclinical studies, significant challenges persist in clinical translation, encompassing pharmacokinetics, biosafety, regulatory pathways, and manufacturing consistency. Future perspectives emphasize the crucial need for deeper understanding and precise control of ROS dynamics, advanced delivery systems, rational material design, and the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate research and clinical validation. This comprehensive review synthesizes the current state, challenges, and future directions for polyphenol‐based biomedical materials.

Polyphenols, particularly catechols, represent a significant class of compounds characterized by their versatile physicochemical and biological properties, sourced from both natural origins and industrial by‐products. This review highlights their critical redox properties, which enable both antioxidant activity and controlled reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation. These dual capacities underpin their diverse biomedical applications, including the development of materials like nanoparticles, hydrogels, bioadhesives, coatings, and membranes. The review explores their utility in areas such as antimicrobial strategies, advanced cancer therapy, and tissue regeneration, demonstrating how their ROS modulation drives therapeutic effects. Despite promising preclinical studies, significant challenges persist in clinical translation, encompassing pharmacokinetics, biosafety, regulatory pathways, and manufacturing consistency. Future perspectives emphasize the crucial need for deeper understanding and precise control of ROS dynamics, advanced delivery systems, rational material design, and the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate research and clinical validation. This comprehensive review synthesizes the current state, challenges, and future directions for polyphenol‐based biomedical materials.

Most commercial adhesives currently available pose significant environmental concerns due to the presence of contaminants such as volatile organic compounds (VOCs). To address this challenge, much research is being focused on developing water-based adhesives. Herein, we demonstrate that polymerisation of a natural polyphenolic compound (pyrogallol) with an amino-based ligand (tris(2-aminoethyl) amine) in water allowed for the development of a novel bioinspired water-based adhesive without involving VOCs. The reaction conditions were meticulously optimised by adjusting the reaction time, ratio, drying methodology and curing temperature, to produce a functional adhesive applicable across a broad spectrum of materials. Adhesion tests demonstrated competitive and outstanding performance on aluminium, followed by wood (oak and pine) and plastics (polypropylene, polycarbonate, and polymethylmethacrylate). Notably, the adhesive outperformed one of the most commercially used adhesives on pine and oak, highlighting its competitive advantage.

The control of surface wettability with polyphenol coatings has been at the forefront of materials research since the late 1990s, when robust underwater adhesion was linked to the presence of L-DOPA—a catecholic amino acid—in unusually high amounts, in the sequences of several mussel foot proteins. Since then, several successful approaches have been reported, although a common undesired feature of most of them is the presence of a remnant color and/or the intrinsic difficulty in fine-tuning and controlling the hydrophobic character. We report here a new family of functional catechol-based coatings, grounded in the oxidative condensation of readily available pyrocatechol and thiol-capped functional moieties. The presence of at least two additional thiol groups in their structure allows for polymerization through the formation of disulfide bonds. The synthetic flexibility, together with its modular character, allowed us to: (I) develop coatings with applications exemplified by textiles for oil-spill water treatment; (II) develop multifunctional coatings, and (III) fine-tune the WCA for flat and textile surfaces. All of this was achieved with the application of colorless coatings.

Nanoparticles (NPs) are receiving increasing interest in biomedical applications. However, due to their large surface area, in physiological environments, they tend to interact with plasma proteins, inducing their agglomeration and ultimately resulting in a substantial efficiency decrease in diagnostic and therapeutic applications. To overcome such problems, NPs are typically coated with a layer of hydrophilic and biocompatible polymers, such as PEG chains. However, few examples exist in which this property could be systematically fine-tuned and combined with added properties, such as emission. Herein, we report a novel mussel-inspired catechol-based strategy to obtain biocompatible and multifunctional coatings, using a previously developed polymerization methodology based on the formation of disulfide bridges under mild oxidative conditions. Two families of NPs were selected as the proof of concept: mesoporous silica NPs (MSNPs), due to their stability and known applications, and magnetite NPs (Fe₃O₄ NPs), due to their small size (<10 nm) and magnetic properties. The PEG coating confers biocompatibility on the NPs and can be further functionalized with bioactive molecules, such as glucose units, through the end carboxylic acid moieties. Once we demonstrated the feasibility of our approach to obtaining PEG-based coatings on different families of NPs, we also obtained multifunctional coatings by incorporating fluorescein functionalities. The resulting coatings not only confer biocompatibility and excellent cell internalization, but also allow for the imaging and tracking of NPs within cells.